


Tenzo's Haunted Treehouse

by stratocumulus



Category: Naruto, ロック・リーの青春フルパワー忍伝 | Rock Lee's Springtime of Youth | Rock Lee & His Ninja Pals
Genre: Clue Fusion/AU, Crack in the style of naruto SD, Everyone lives/nobody defects au, Gen, alternating pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:15:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28952538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stratocumulus/pseuds/stratocumulus
Summary: Konoha 12 are snatched from their beds in the middle of the night to play Mansion Murder Mystery in the middle of the woods.(If you've seen the movie Clue, it's basically that)
Relationships: Konoha 12 & Konoha 12
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Tenzo's Haunted Treehouse

**Author's Note:**

> not edited; I literally wrote this instead of sleeping asldjlasjd

Konoha Hidden Village is the largest of the shinobi villages of the Five Great Nations---the first established, the strongest, and the one that has prospered most over the years.

In this day and age, it was a time of peace, and nowhere could that be felt more than in Konoha.

So naturally, no one suspected a thing as four seasoned jounin sped through the dark of night, ducking in and out of homes.

First, one child went missing. Then two, three.

A masked man gently removed a line of ninja wire and slid open the window to a tiny apartment. 

“Should I be worried about how easy this is…?”

In the dead of night, a dozen young genin were taken---clan heirs included---simply just snatched away, something no one could have imagined. 

It turns out, the young shinobi are not taken all that far away. The abductors stop a stone’s throw from Konoha’s walls, deep in the forest in a secure location surrounded with seals that would keep any searching guards away. They could look all night and not find the stolen 12. Hidden in plain sight was a wooden, two-story building that looked quite like an inn.

Four figures approached in the dark.

-

Kakashi, Gai, Asuma, and Kurenai set their sleeping students down one by one, propping them up against the wall of the main open space, a living room, on the first floor, as if laying out an offering to the lone figure still shrouded by the dark.

Asuma gave the shadowy man a cheeky grin then a wink, as Kurenai walked over to take his arm.

“Thanks, Tenzo, for babysitting,” he said with a laugh.

Tenzo gave the man a wry smile and waved as the couple departed. “Not a problem.”

Yes it was a lot like babysitting, wasn’t it? Though Kakashi-senpai would no doubt lurk on the roof or in a nearby tree, pretending to read his porn despite the darkness making that virtually impossible, and Gai would probably stick around to keep Kakashi-senpai company. Tenzo could always pull them back in to play bit parts if the plot really called for it. 

Kakashi clapped Tenzo on the shoulder and gave him one of his over the top smiles, as if covering up three-quarters of one’s face left the single remaining quarter responsible for working three times as hard to convey emotions.

“Well, I’ll leave it to you then, my adorable kouhai. I’m sure you’ll scare them good.”

“Train them,” Tenzo corrects.

“Maa, you might as well have some fun yourself.” Senpai was right, of course. The training exercise could have taken place in any manner of locations, yet Tenzo chose this, mirrored after a little ghost story in a short story collection he was particularly fond of. 

Gai gave Tenzo a broad grin and thumbs up. “I’m sure our wonderful young students will have an unparalleled learning experience in your capable hands!” he says before Kakashi clasps his shoulder to guide him out. Tenzo waves them farewell too.

And then it is just him and the 12 genin.

Tenzo makes a handsign. “Kai!”

The young shinobi snap to wakefulness, with varying responses. Interesting. The Nara heir continues to feign sleep. The jinchuuriki knocks his head against the wall and jerks back, looking left and right blearily. Someone---the girl with braids? Or the Akimichi, screams. Sasuke startles, and takes in his surroundings before jumping to his feet.

“KATON-!”

Quick to attack, huh. It might have been impressive, if it worked. Tenzo slaps a seal on the last Uchiha’s forehead, and the boy falls to the ground in shock, chakra stalling. 

“Sorry about that, should have figured you’d all wake with a scare.” Lightning and thunder crash outside, illuminating Tenzo’s happuri-framed face in ghastly light. “Though I suppose that _is_ the point.”

“YAHHHHH!” Naruto, of all people, shrieks, reeling back and squishing Lee---splitting image of his teacher---beside him into a corner. He’d heard from senpai Naruto was a brash and bold sort of brat, and this certainly wasn’t the reaction he expected. “Gh-gh-gh-GHOST! IT’S A GHOST!!!”

The wailing comes to a stop with a SMACK---his own teammate hits him over the head with a fist. 

“Idiot!” she---Sakura---says, pointing to Tenzo’s face with her other hand. “That’s not a ghost, it’s clearly a Konoha jounin!” The leaf symbol is clearly displayed after all.

“How do we know this isn’t a trap?” Another one of them hazards.

Tenzo sighs. “If you’re wondering how you got here, you can thank your jounin teachers.”

As if on cue, Kakashi-senpai appears with a breeze by Tenzo’s side, and Naruto starts to exclaim something but is muffled by Sakura covering his mouth.

“It’s a training exercise,” Kakashi says.

Tenzo smiles at the genin group, and Sasuke’s dark glare narrows into a more sullen, suspicious look. A moment later, Gai appears on his other side. 

“Gai-sensei!” a pair of voices chirp in joy/outrage.

“You twelve have been selected for a training exercise,” Tenzo says, “Administered by me. You may call me ‘Yamato-san.’”

“A training exercise in the middle of the night?” Shikamaru asks skeptically.

Gai gives the group a big smile. “The twelve of you rookies will be taking the chuunin exams this year, and this is something we have arranged to better help you prepare for it!” They perk up at that, some more visibly than others. 

“Yamato’s the best!” Kakashi adds in that facetious tone and smile of his. “Well! We’ll leave you all to it then. Do your best not to die!” he says cheerfully as he disappears in a gust. More than one genin gulps.

“Well, you heard them,” Tenzo, aka Yamato, says. “Your jounin instructors noticed that there are some gaps in your experience that your missions so far have not given you the opportunity to learn. This exercise is to help address that.”

All of them stand at the ready now, awaiting their exercise instructions.

“It will proceed like this: One of you is the killer.” Surprise flits across all of their faces. “Each hour, from now until dawn, someone will die.”

Thunder punctuates his dramatic opening statement.

“Of course, they will not really die.” The smile on Yamato’s face is not at all reassuring. “The rules are: Everyone must stay within this house. Once you have been marked dead by the killer---with a blood splatter---you are out of the game. You will remain in this room and you will be forbidden to participate and further affect the game. No one is allowed to attack with lethal intent; the point of this exercise is not to fight, but to puzzle your way through a situation where you are confined to a hostile environment and have limited information.”

“The killer has already been assigned.” This seems to surprise a few of them even further. “You will be able to note the difference between an attack from your fellow trainees and the killer because they will be required to state ‘I am the killer’ before landing the blow.”

“A gong will ring every hour, marking the end of the hour and one more trainee being removed from the running. We will meet here in this room when the gong rings so the group can assess the progress, share information, and have one chance to name the killer. If you manage to escape the killer and no one dies that hour, good for you, but the game continues until you correctly name the killer. You collectively get one answer each hour.”

“That’s six hours until dawn. Those remaining alive at the end will receive some sort of prize from your respective jounin instructors. If the game ends before dawn, I will put in a good word for you,” Yamato says. “Are we ready to begin?”

Shikamaru raises a hand. Of course---the one with the supposed highest IQ of the group. No doubt he would try to draw some clue out before this even began.

“Yes?”

“Um. Do we have to do this in our pajamas though?” he asks with a sigh.

-

Thankfully Kurenai had brought up that very issue, though had they not asked the game would indeed have proceeded in pajamas. 

The genin are each given a storage scroll with uniform dark blue pants and shirts to change into, which at the same time gives them a chance to explore the creepy, dim wooden house as they all head off in different directions to find a room to change in. There are two and a half levels---the half being a large attic sort of nook on the top floor---and a bizarre number of staircases and hallways to maximize confusion. 

One by one they return to the main room, and when the last one arrives, the lights flicker. 

“We will begin the game...now,” Yamato’s voice rings out.

_GONG!_

The lights go out, thunder crashes, and the silhoutte of a scuffle is illuminated on the back wall for an instant as lightning flashes.

The lights turn back on, and everyone’s eyes whip over to the victim with great surprise: it’s Sasuke, the supposed genius of their year.

Sasuke lies limp in the arms of his comrade, Naruto, who slouches to the floor in shock.

“SASUKEEEEEE!!!!” 

Sasuke has one arm flung over his abdomen---sticky with the okonomiyaki sauce they used as a blood substitute prop---and the other is shaking as he raises it toward Naruto’s face.

“Naruto….” he croaks out. “Avenge me.” His trembling hand finds its mark, poking Naruto in the forehead and leaving a sticky sauce stain, and then Sasuke falls backward, still and dead.

“NOOOOO!!!!” Naruto cries, big fat tears dropping onto his dead friend. “I will! I promise I’ll find whoever did this to you, and-! And!!!!”

Ino looks on with bemusement, but for Sakura this is old hat.

“Is he always so..?”

“Yeah.”

Lee’s eyes start to water with sympathetic tears, and soon he is crying over the body of his fallen comrade along with Naruto, promising him to help find the killer who did this to their friend. Lee’s teammate TenTen stands off to the side and looks distinctly unamused. His other team member, the Hyuga, Neji, remains near the back and looks as if he smelled something sour. But then again he typically looked like that, from what Shikamaru can remember. 

Choji looks surprisingly forlorn, Shikamaru notices, until he opens his mouth.

“Did they have to use okonomiyaki sauce? Now I have a hankering.” Of course.

Yamato-san walks back into the room from the direction of the front door, and Shikamaru eyes him curiously.

“Hm, seems our killer this year is eager,” Yamato-san says. “Well, no matter. You may discuss among yourselves, or not, and I will be back at the end of the hour to hear your answer.”

He kneels down next to the first victim with another seal. “Sorry, Sasuke-kun, but you’re going to have to take a little nap now so as to not give away any clues, whether you mean to or not.”

“Hn,” is Sasuke’s vague reply, though he doesn’t so much as crack an eye open. Yamato-san sticks a paper seal tag to his forehead, and Sasuke goes to sleep. “The victims will be moved off the premises after the first hour, but until then they will stay as ‘evidence,’” Yamato-san elaborates before he shunshins away.

The remaining genin stare at Sasuke’s ‘corpse.’

“Who could have _done_ such a thing?” Naruto grits out.

“This is just an exercise, remember, Naruto…” Shikamaru says. Some of these guys are getting _way_ too into this...troublesome.

“They would have had to be really strong, right?” Sakura says with a slight tremble in her voice that she tries to hide with a cheerful ending to the question. 

“Not necessarily,” Shikamaru says with a frown. “They merely took advantage of Sasuke still being off-footed from the first chakra seal Yamato-san had put on him.”

The group eye each other warily.

“W- who was closest to Sasuke-kun when we arrived?” a timid voice pipes up. Hinata flushes red as everyone turns to look at her. “Um- I mean-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Neji speaks up. He frowns, putting a hand to his chin. “They had more or less lined us up by team, but everyone started moving as soon as we woke up.”

“And then when the lights went out, there was definitely a fight,” Kiba says. Akamaru, they notice, is present as well, and yips from his place on Kiba’s head.

“Well it wasn’t me!” Naruto says. Shikamaru slaps his hand to his face.

“I did not attack Sasuke-kun either!” Lee adds, not helping at all. A few start to bicker, and Shikamaru watches, wondering whether the killer will reveal some clue, or if he should take the reins in this situation.

“There is no use declaring your innocence,” Shino speaks up. Interesting. He is typically the quiet sort. Perhaps he feels emboldened by something…? “Why? Because the killer could just lie.”

“And we can’t question Sasuke-kun because he’s ‘dead,’” Ino muses. She glances around the room, no doubt wishing she knew the more advanced techniques of her clan, and could mind walk the answer out. 

Akamaru barks again, and Kiba sighs. “If Sasuke hadn’t gotten sauce all over Naruto and Lee, we probably could have sniffed them out…”

“Well? Does anyone else smell like sauce? Besides Naruto-kun and Lee-kun, of course, because then they’d obviously be the killer,” Sakura says. 

Kiba sniffs the air, the frowns. Akamaru hops off of Kiba and circles the room, and it dawns on Shikamaru that their gamemaster is quite sneaky after all. And the killer had definitely been briefed beforehand, before the rest of them. 

“Let me guess, everyone smells like sauce,” Shikamaru sighs. It’s the clothes they’d all changed into. His asking to not do this exercise in pajamas had been a mistake. Stupid!

“Well it’s definitely not me or Sakura!” Naruto says without basis. “What would be the point of attacking our own team?”

“Maybe you attacked your own team precisely to throw off our scent!” Kiba retorts. Was teamwork a factor to this exercise? Were they supposed to work together to find the killer? To Shikamaru’s surprise, Sakura voices exactly that question.

“Do you think the point of the exercise is to work together as a team? In order to find the killer?” she says. She looks to Naruto, who seems to understand exactly what she’s saying. “I mean, if our jounin instructors are in on it….Kakashi-sensei did a similar test with us when we first met. It sounded like an exercise that pitted us against each other, but the way to pass was to team up together, against him.”

They seem to think this over.

“That seems unlikely. Why? Because one of your team is already down.”

“Yeah, refusal to play and name a killer doesn’t seem like the way out of this one,” Shikamaru concludes out loud. 

“It’s settled then,” Neji says, and everyone looks to him. “We should go our separate ways, maybe even in teams. It will be easier to catch the killer if we isolate him.” 

“Or her,” Ino says, rolling her eyes. Shikamaru mentally slaps his forehead. Way to draw suspicion to herself. Unless…? 

Neji turns, ignoring her, heading toward the east-most set of stairs. “Lee, Tenten.” They start to follow. 

“Wait,” Shikamaru starts. “I think we should all stay together in the main room.”

Neji does stop, but he certainly doesn’t look convinced.

“This way we will all be on guard and we can all see each other. It won’t be easy for the killer to strike if there are more witnesses, versus less,” Shikamaru says. “Also, if the next person ‘dies’ and two return from a group of three, it merely means we have to take the word of the two survivors, one of which will _definitely_ be lying, because we won’t have witnessed the crime ourselves.”

An unsavory idea occurs to Shikamaru, that maybe this is more like a numbers puzzle than a mock investigation. Split into group of threes, and of the two that return, lock them in a room and see which one comes out alive. Or would they simply not move at that point? Perhaps it was worth trying to detain the suspected killer…?

No, he’ll save that tactic if this first one doesn’t work.

The group look to each other in an unofficial survey.

“If Shikamaru says it’s a good idea, I think we should do it,” Choji says, throwing in his two cents, though no one doubted his opinion. 

Ino huffs, and flips her hair over her shoulder. “I agree. If we all go our separate ways who’s to say the killer won’t attack while we’re all still moving around?”

The rest murmur, and seem to agree.

“It’s settled then,” Shikamaru says, unhappy to have become the de facto leader. The extra vigilance would be troublesome.

-

It’s “settled” for about forty minutes, before people get huffy and bored. They were close, Shikamaru will say that much, but then Naruto jumped up in a fit of excess energy and challenged Lee to a spar.

“C’mon bushy brows! You said you were a taijutsu expert! I’ve never met a ninja who doesn’t use ninjutsu, let me see how strong you are!” 

“Naruto-kun, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Ahh, I knew it, you were lying!”

“I most certainly was not, and I do not appreciate being called a liar!” 

Moments later, one loud “kage bunshin no jutsu!!” exclamation later, bodies were being thrown into walls and the building might have been made out of some sturdy stuff but people were leaping out of the way, onto stairwells and railings, and now they were scattered.

“Shit.” Just the diversion the killer would need. “Guys,” Shikamaru called out, trying to get the situation under control, to no avail. Shit. He should have put a stop to things earlier. “Guys!”

It’s far too late, people are joining the fight, running away, or perhaps even taking advantage of the big diversion, and seeing each other’s movements only signaled to each player to move as well. Shikamaru looked around, trying to track everyone. Several members were already out of sight. Hinata, Shino, were gone. Kiba was still around, egging the fighting duo on. Shikamaru’s distracted for a moment, marveling at how easily Lee is deflecting Naruto’s mini-army. Taijutsu expert, huh?

He looks around. “Chouji, help me get these guys to calm down,” Shikamaru calls out over the ruckus. Where was Ino? 

Choji is clearly reluctant, but he complies. “Human Boulder!” 

“That’s not what I meant!!” Shikamaru groans. He’d hoped Choji would grab one or both of them, but really that was too much to ask. It was hard to tell which was the real Naruto and Lee was something of a human sized hurricane. To make matters worse, his giant spinning boulder attack through the main room meant _no one_ could see _anything._

At least the fighting stops.

When the debris and fuss finally die down, most people come back or at least peek into the main room again, and Shikamaru quickly tries to get things under control.

“Okay, roll call!” he shouts out. “We have to make sure everyone is here.”

Shit, how close were they to the hour? He looks to the clock, there’s still a few minutes, that’s good at least, it should give them time to debrief on everyone’s movements, maybe suss out a few more clues.

“LEE!!” 

They find Naruto standing over a body, before falling to his knees in shock. Could it be…?

“Who?!” he bites out in outrage. “Who could have taken down someone as strong as you?!”

Those are bitter tears in Naruto’s eyes, as he acknowledges that he couldn’t even land a single blow on Lee during their spar. It must have been in the aftermath of the chaos, then. Shikamaru eyes the chunk of railing Choji knocked apart, which landed close enough to Lee that he must have rolled out of his way only to get taken by surprise. A splotch of okonomiyaki sauce covers his chest. 

“I- I never thought…” he chokes out, before falling silent, head rolling to the side. 

“Man, everyone’s really committed to these ‘deaths,’” Shikamaru says, honestly kind of baffled at the theatrics. He sighs. At least thing should give them more data. 

“Did anyone see what happened?” he asks the room at large, but he looks to the two Hyugas, with their prized eyes and vision. Hinata shakes her head, looking upset. Neji gives a curt “no” and looks at his possum-playing teammate with utter exasperation.

_GONG!_

Purposely loud steps signal Yamato-san entering from the direction of the front door.

“Goodness, what happened here?” he asks, though he doesn’t truly sound concerned. Shikamaru suspects he has some way of keeping an eye on everything within the premises somehow. “Remember what I said at the beginning, that fighting isn’t necessarily going to help you.”

Naruto looks up with big sad eyes and a pout. “We got bored, and we were just gonna spar, you know. But then-” Naruto gives Choji the stink eye, and Choji rears up in offense, which Shikamaru kind of really feels guilty about now, because Choji doesn’t like being disliked and Choji doesn’t _deserve_ to be disliked, really, when it was him who gave a bad order, and well

“So? Who is the killer?” Yamato-san asks the room.

Silence. They had wasted time, their last twenty minutes nearly, with a spar and then the destruction of property, and hadn’t had a chance to discuss what answer they were going to put forth. Frankly no one had been comfortable committing to an answer in their first half hour or so of discussion anyway.

“Naruto, it was you, wasn’t it?” Ino accuses.

“Me?!” Naruto jumps to his feet, balling his hands in fists, taking this _way_ too seriously. Shikamaru is _certain_ it wasn’t Naruto. 

Sakura hesitates, but backs Ino up from the other side of the room. “You _were_ holding Sasuke when he fell. And you were just fighting Lee,” she says.

Naruto turns wide eyes on her, taking a step back and looking a million shades of betrayed. 

“I- I couldn’t even land a single hit on him! You guys saw him, Lee’s really strong, you know!” he says, clearly grumbly about being outmatched in the spar, but vehement about defending his innocence anyhow.

“Is that your final answer?” Yamato-san asks, not concerned with the discussion. 

“Naruto had like, ten of him running around,” Kiba adds, nodding. “I bet it was him.”

Others seem to cotton onto the idea, Shikamaru realizes with a worry. “Wait-”

“You only get one answer each hour, at the end of the minute you’ll have wasted it if you cannot agree on one,” Yamato-san says.

“It was Naruto!” Ino says decisively, though most of the other voices are in agreement anyway. Yamato-san holds up a hand to silence them, and there’s a pregnant pause before he answers.

“Sorry, that is incorrect,” he says, and those who had voted for Naruto deflate while Naruto seems to bristle with the proof of his innocence. “I will be back in one hour.”

Yamato-san disappears with sleeping-Sasuke, and leaves sealed-Lee where he fell. Shikamaru sighs, deeply. They just wasted a perfectly good guess. They had four more, before they had to give the final, correct answer. As much as Shikamaru dislikes to work, it doesn’t sit well with him to just ride things out and bide his time when there is still this _puzzle_ in front of him that he hasn’t solved yet. If he had a strong suspect, he might feel differently, and be content to hang back until the endgame. But as of right now…

“See! I told you guys I didn’t do it!” Naruto says, sticking out his tongue, and then crossing his arms across his middle. He seems to shrink in on himself, looking something like that lonely kid Shikamaru remembers seeing during their schooldays, before Naruto had comrades he could call his own.

“Of course you didn’t,” Shikamaru makes a point of saying loudly. “It couldn’t have been you, Naruto, you were too far from Lee, and Sasuke all but absolved you with his last words.”

Naruto blinks, looking up at him, and then grins, crossing his arms behind his head. “At least one of you guys has brains. Hehe.”

Shikamaru sighs. “Unfortunately, we scattered, so we still don’t know who did it,” he says. They’d been sitting in a big circle that would have ensured that if anyone tried to move the two people on either side would realize, even if the lights went out. And that was a bust. “This is why we need to stay in one spot.”

Naruto deflates a little at that. Good. It actually was his fault anyway. 

No one is happy with the result, but they all agree to it anyway. 

“So, circle again?” Neji asks, resigned to the strategy. Shikamaru nods.

-

It’s an incredibly _boring_ hour. It doesn’t help that yawning appears to be contagious, and for every one yawn three seem to follow. He’s glad no one’s called him out on his apparent wakefulness; it’d be an awkward thing to explain that he napped all day not just to keep up the lazy pretense (well, he was kind of lazy, that was still true), but because he was practically nocturnal at this point. 

In an attempt to keep people alert and awake, Shikamaru shares some more of his findings, not necessarily happy about giving away incomplete intel, but the reactions on everyone’s faces might be just as telling.

“When the fight got messy, I couldn’t track everyone, but these are the people I didn’t see in the room,” Shikamaru says, immediately gaining everyone’s attention. “Hinata was gone, and so was Shino, and Ino.”

Shikamaru hesitates. “I remember seeing Neji,” he says, though he can’t remember if he stayed though the whole fight. “But there was so much chaos at the end, that I can only say for certain that Choji, Naruto, Lee were in the room, and we know for a fact now that it wasn’t Naruto, and couldn’t be Lee.”

“So it was Choji, then?” Kiba says, and Shikamaru is pretty sure now that Kiba is a total idiot, probably even dumber than Naruto. Shikamaru decides to, privately, rule out Kiba. 

“Me?!” Choji squawks. 

“Choji was on the other side of the room,” Neji says with exasperation, though Shikamaru is thankful for it because, one, he’s not the only non-idiot here, and two, it wouldn’t have sounded as impartial coming from Shikamaru.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Naruto says. “Wouldn’t the people _not_ in the room be more suspicious? They were being sneaky!”

“They were trying not to get crushed in the middle of your fight!” Sakura says.

“So that would be Hinata, and Shino, and Ino,” Choji muses. “I didn’t see TenTen-san either.”

“I was also trying not to get crushed, thank you very much!” TenTen huffs. 

Neji surveys the room one by one, then “Byakugan!” 

Shikamaru sits up with some interest; he was going to ask, if it came to that. Would Byakugan uncover the killer’s ‘weapons’? Neji shook his head, and Shikamaru had his answer. Still, that was...interesting. It wasn’t just that someone had a tube of sauce up their sleeve then, but something cleverly obscured. 

The hour nears the end, and everyone has their eye on each other. And there are few enough of them now that Shikamaru is pretty sure that it would be simple enough to narrow down their choices from either side of the next “victim,” because surely if it was someone farther it would be even more obvious. 

Thunder crashes. Lightning strikes. The house goes dark and the sound of rain pouring comes as a sudden onslaught, loud enough to compete with the ringing of the gong that sounds just a moment later.

_GONG!_

It takes a moment longer than usual for the lights to come back up and when they do---it’s certainly not what Shikamaru is expecting.

Directly across from Shikamaru in the circle is Hinata, who looks as if she’s fainted and fallen backwards, if not for the okonomiyaki sauce spread over her neck and dribbling to the ground marking her ‘dead.’ 

Shino, to Hinata’s right, seems taken aback at this as well---as minutely as an Aburame would be taken aback anyway---not least of all because he must have first seen the _second death_ , directly across from him where _Ino_ now lay, sauce splattered on her front, before realizing something had changed in the game, because Hinata is down too. 

“Wh-WHA!” Naruto jumps to his feet, noticing Ino first, then Hinata two spots over later. 

_What in the world?_

At 12 o’clock sat Hinata, and, clockwise from her: Sakura, Naruto, Ino, Choji, Shikamaru, Tenten, Neji, Kiba, Shino. 

“Two deaths?” Neji says, clearly upset the rules have changed or that he missed something.

Next to Hinata was Shino on one side, and Sakura on the other. Shino’s surprise suggested it was Sakura, but it seems Shikamaru was _wrong_ about just how exactly this killer’s ‘weapon’ worked because it didn’t seem like it actually needed the proximity he thought if _two_ people had fallen.

Sakura could not have hit both Hinata and Ino. She would have had to have gotten past Naruto to target Ino, and Naruto looks downright flabbergasted that Ino is down. They already know for a fact that Naruto isn’t the killer, and Choji isn’t the killer, _both of who are on either side of Ino._

“Shit,” Shikamaru says, running his hand down his face. 

The loud steps coming from the front of the house alert everyone of Yamato-san’s arrival and---to Shikamaru’s surprise---it’s not that the jounin looks _surprised_ exactly, but his eyes land on Ino, closer to the door, and then on Hinata, and the fact that he walks closer to inspect the body, as if ascertaining the sauce was the same...it suggests to Shikamaru he wasn’t expecting two deaths either. 

“Eager after all, I see,” Yamato-san says. “But surely that gives you all more clues. Well? Do you have an answer?”

This was the worst part; only a minute to answer.

Kiba turns to glare at Shino. “Shino, was it you?”

“What? I-”

“You picked _Hinata?_ From our _own team?”_

“I did no such thing,” Shino says firmly, despite it not counting for much. 

Kiba seems to accept it at face value however, and points at Sakura. “Then it must have been her!”

“Oi!” Naruto says, gesturing at Ino. “What about Ino? There are two? No one said there could be two!”

Yamato-san glances at both ‘victims.’ “As long as the killer states so before targeting the victim and hitting their mark, it counts,” Yamato-san says.

Hitting their mark. Shikamaru turns the words over in his head. No, that didn’t help much, it could be a close hit or...a long range one. All it did was re-confirm that being next to someone didn’t count for much after all. 

Neji says as much. “It clearly doesn’t matter if it’s the person next to the victim,” he says with a scowl, thinking as he crosses his arms. “If that were the main criteria, Sakura couldn’t have hit Ino, and we know both Naruto and Choji aren’t it. And even if we were wrong about Choji, he couldn’t have hit Hinata. The attack clearly can be a long range one.”

Silence.

“Do you have an answer?” Yamato-san asks again. “If not, you forfeit this round and I will be back in an hour.”

“Shikamaru!” 

Shikamaru looks up to see Kiba launching a wild accusation yet again.

“Hold on a minute,” he retorts, exasperated. Why would _he_ , of _all suspects,_

“Yeah, maybe it _was_ ,” TenTen adds in, to his surprise, though she says it without much heat. She was right _next to him_ , for goodness sake. “He’s been leading us around all this time and who’s to say it wasn’t so he could distract us?”

Sakura nods in agreement, and Naruto looks at Shikamaru as if he’s grown two heads. 

“Guys, guys wait-” Shikamaru says.

“All in favor of naming Shikamaru?” Neji says.

“Hey!” he protests, but at this point he’s pretty sure it’s a lost cause. Ah well. At least it’ll clear his name for good and give him a free pass in the next rounds.

“Sorry, that is incorrect,” Yamato-san says once they’ve all nodded in their affirmative votes. Ino and Hinata are tagged with sleep seals, and Lee is led off the premises. 

Shikamaru scowls, but more exasperated with the poor logic guiding the group than any personal hurt and betrayal.

Frankly it doesn’t say good things about the collective intelligence of the group.

But that’s how groups work, don’t they? By some law, it seems, the dumbest person in any given room ends up having the biggest voice. He’d have to file this theory away for later; it may be pertinent in future negotiations, to not take in the group message until he’s spoken to individuals. Anyway.

“Guys, we only have two guesses left,” Shikamaru says tiredly.

“Eh? Don’t we have three?” Naruto asks.

“Technically, though the last one isn’t really a guess, we need to be certain by then,” Shikamaru sighs.

“We need to split up this time,” Neji insists. Shikamaru doesn’t counter it. “We tried it your way, twice, and we’ve gotten nowhere.”

Well, not _nowhere._

Shikamaru walks over to better look at the sauce splatters from the most recent kill. Hinata’s is a slapshod mimicry of being slit across the neck, and likely applied at close range, assuming the sauce is applied like sauce might normally be. Ino’s splatter may have happened at long range; it certainly required some force to leave a splatter that wide. Interesting.

“How about two groups?” Shikamaru suggests. “You, TenTen, Sakura, and Naruto take the second level, and me, Choji, Kiba, and Shino stay on this ground level. And then whether we split up or stay together after that is up to yourselves.”

Neji thinks it over, and nods. Shikamaru wonders if he shares his own suspicions, but doesn’t voice them. 

If someone in Shikamaru’s group falls, the killer must be Shino. He’s already ruled out Kiba and Choji purely for their lack of cunning.

If someone falls on the second floor, ruling out Naruto, it should be easy enough to guess the killer. Even better, if they pick the wrong one out of two, they had a surefire correct response for the next round, which would become a survival round once the killer’s identity was exposed. 

“Oi! Don’t we get any say in this?” Naruto interjects.

“Sure,” Shikamaru says. “What’s your suggestion?”

“I- eh?” Naruto thinks. Of course he hadn’t had one. “I _guess_ I don’t have a problem with it,” he says begrudgingly, following Sakura up the stairs, while Neji and TenTen take a different set.

Neji gives the two fallen team members a last glance as he does, and Shikamaru startles with the realization that he hadn’t even considered Neji the killer. Why? Simply because he had helped take the lead to strategize? All that shows is that he is clever enough to throw people off his scent. Had Shikamaru been taken in?

-

Shikamaru’s suspicion of Neji turns out to be for naught, because Neji is the next one down.

A little over half an hour in, a scream comes from the second floor and Shikamaru and Choji, who had been lounging in the main room, look to each other before getting to their feet.

“Guess the killer was upstairs, huh?” Choji says.

“How troublesome…”

Shino and Kiba appear soon enough as well, not surprisingly from the same entrance.

“What’s going on?” Kiba demands.

“Upstairs,” Shikamaru answers.

Upstairs, they find an upset TenTen standing over a Neji who seems to be mimicking the classic crime-scene chalk-outline pose, face down and all.

“We all went separate ways and when I turned on the light in this room I just _found him_ like this!” she says, upset that two of her team members are down.

“How do we know you’re not the killer!” Naruto says, pointing at her. 

Shikamaru surveys the upstairs team; Sakura and Naruto entered from the same direction, but they hadn’t been in the same room before that.

He hangs back this time, and lets them squabble and make their accusations and protestations of innocence. The mark this time is a blob of sauce on the center of Neji’s back, nothing particularly interesting.

Curiously, he notices Shino looking at him from off to the side. Shikamaru wonders if perhaps Shino had snuck upstairs before making his way down---no, surely Kiba would have brought it up? They’d left in pairs to keep an eye on each other after all (so that _Kiba_ could keep an eye on Shino _for_ Shikamaru, but he didn’t need to know that). Unless, they’d struck some sort of deal? A promise not to kill/eliminate Kiba from the game in exchange for his silence and complicity. 

Hmm. 

_GONG!_

The gong signaling the end of the hour brings the squabbling, which has started and stopped on and off over the last twenty or so minutes, to an end. 

“What do we do about Neji?” Choji asks. 

Shikamaru is surprised they turn again to him.

“I guess, let’s go downstairs. That was the rule. And Yamato-san can tell us what to do with Neji.”

Yamato-san is already there by the time they get to the main room.

“Well?” he asks. “Who is the killer?”

There’s a beat of silence, despite all the squabbling they’d already gotten done earlier. 

“It’s got to be TenTen, right?” Kiba says, looking to the others to try to assure himself of the popular vote.

“It was _not!”_ TenTen snaps for the umpteenth time.

“But you were standing right over the body!” Naruto says. 

“Even if you aren’t the killer, Naruto, it could have been Sakura!” she says. Plus, Naruto and Sakura arrived last, and all the ground-floor suspects arrived before them, but no one points that out.

“So it’s got to be TenTen, right?” Naruto says, looking to Sakura for support. 

“The killer is Sakura,” Shikamaru interjects. “And I can prove it.” That’s definitive enough that no one tries to counter the answer he’s given. 

All eyes turn to him, curious about his proof, but he watches Yamato-san, and Sakura out of the corner of his eye. Yamato’s a far harder read. Sakura is surprised a beat too long---she was feigning the expression---before giving a small smirk and looking just a tad put out she was so close to winning. Though Shikamaru suspects that internally she is throwing a much bigger fit.

“That is correct,” Yamato-san says, and mayhem breaks out with questions thrown everywhich way.

There’s a _puff!_ of smoke and Kakashi-sensei reappears with Sasuke and Ino and Hinata, and then Gai-sensei is there with Lee and Neji. 

“Yes,” Sakura says. “It was me.”

“Ah!” Ino exclaims as she remembers. “You tried to get everyone’s attention off of you from the very beginning, saying it had to be someone strong to defeat Sasuke-kun, since we all know you’re not strong at all!”

“What did you say?” Sakura snarls back, on fire. Though, really, Ino is correct, that had been her reasoning. 

“She surprised me,” Sasuke says sullenly, ignoring Naruto’s jeering that he got beaten so early. “I decided to go along with it.”

Lee turns to Sakura, eyes round and shiny. “But why did you target me next, Sakura-san?”

“After that plan to sit together in the main room, I was waiting for an opening,” Sakura said, confirming Shikamaru’s suspicion that if Naruto hadn’t created a diversion, Yamato-san would have, as in the third hour. “Thankfully you guys created a big enough one that no one could see the whole picture of what was happening, and then it was just a matter of targeting whoever was closest.”

At Lee’s hurt puppy-eyes, Sakura winces. “Sorry, Lee.”

“Then- what about the third time?” Hinata pipes up. “How did you hit two…?”

“That was me,” Shino says, to everyone’s great surprise, Sakura included. “Why? Because I was curious as to whether the killer would slip up and reveal themselves if they were no longer in control of the pace.”

“But-but-” Naruto sputters. “Do you carry sauce on you everywhere along with bugs?!!”

Shino pushes up his ever-present glasses. “In your spar with Lee-san, the killer dropped one of the sauce seals beside Lee-san and no one else noticed, so I picked it up and considered my options.”

“But, Shino-kun, why me?” Hinata asks.

“Actually, I targeted you,” Sakura says, blinking from taking in Shino’s plan. “Shino-kun must have taken out Ino-pig, though I definitely was going to go after her next if he hadn’t.”

“Hah?! Why me?” Ino demands angrily.

“Why? Because from the beginning you had very strong outbursts, which served to direct the flow of the conversation. It would have been in the interest of the killer to do such a thing,” Shino said. He pre-empts the next question. “But none of you saw me move. Why? Because I did not move, my bugs did.” 

Ino is taken aback, wide-eyed and a little bit freaked out. “But I heard-”

Shino lifts his hand, a small swarm of his bugs with it. “They can emit sounds sometimes,” he explains, as they buzz at a high, quiet pitch that shifts up and down, sounding tinny but clearly forming patterns of sounds that are similar enough to speech. “The noises can be approximated for quiet words if they do so precisely enough.”

Kiba laughs. “Shino that’s gross.”

Shino bristles at that fact, as much as an Aburame can bristle anyway, but Neji interrupts the intra-team dispute. “I was the fifth, or technically fourth, victim,” he says, then scowls. “That’s why I didn’t see anything when I tried to determine who the killer was by looking for the ‘weapons.’ The sauce was tucked away in small seals that were easily obscured as part of our uniform clothing.”

“All Sakura had to do was lean over and tag and whisper to Hinata, and Shino apparently didn’t have such proximity restrictions,” Shikamaru says. And _that_ had been why he looked so surprised Hinata, who was sitting beside him, fell when the lights came back on. 

“Then what about Neji?” Naruto asks.

“Splitting up definitely worked in the killer’s favor,” Sakura says. “I approached pretending I was talking to someone and it must have put him off his guard. He saw me coming but it didn’t matter anyway because once you’re tagged you can’t help the remaining players!”

“So how did you know?” Sakura turns to Shikamaru.

Heh. Well those explanations had certainly factored into his thinking, but in truth, his conclusion came by in a much simpler manner.

“From the beginning, it bothered me: all of us were taken here unaware there was even going to be a training. Yamato-san only briefed us on the rules for the players. The killer would have had to have been briefed before the game even began,” Shikamaru says.

“The question, then, wasn’t who was capable of playing the killer,” Shikamaru says. “It was, who would the jounin teachers choose? It would have to be someone who could follow instructions well, which rules out, well, frankly at least a third of us here. Coupled with the consideration of how lazy they’ve been, effectively handing off the entire training to someone else---no offense, Yamato-san---and, well, sorry Sakura, but you’re kind of known to be a bookworm, and teacher’s pet.”

His peers’ admiration at his logic is overshadowed by Naruto’s audible gulp. Shikamaru glances over, and then wishes he didn’t. Sakura’s on fire again, and this time it seems to be directed at him.

“Bookworm, huh? Teacher’s pet,” she repeats, taking a step forward, cracking her knuckles.

_Urk._


End file.
